The present invention relates generally to improvements in reporting of nutritional information to consumers, and more specifically to itemized reporting of nutritional information of specific food items served to a patron of a meal preparation establishment.
Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of food they eat and associated nutritional information of specific meal items. The prior art includes many instances of dietetic and nutritional information systems for use at home or when purchasing food items from a supermarket. These prior art systems assist a consumer with evaluation or preparation of meals having a desired nutritional profile or other preselected characteristics.
However, these systems are inadequate to properly categorize and tabulate nutritional information for meals prepared by someone else. For example, a patron of a meal preparation establishment, such as a restaurant or delicatessen, is usually totally unaware of specific or detailed nutritional information or content for these meal items. At best, some quick service restaurants provide average nutritional information for selected standardized meal items. This information can be quite inaccurate for specific meals prepared at these establishment, especially when a consumer customizes the meal items to add or delete meal components of the standardized items. The consumer, using prior art systems, is not in a position to evaluate nutritional information of the specific meal that was prepared by the establishment, nor is the consumer able to accurately evaluate the effect of any customizations to the meal items.
It is another disadvantage of prior art systems in that they fail to differentiate food items purchased for several people, or several meals. The prior art systems either are designed for operation with a single consumer, or nutritional information is coalesced into a single value, or averaged to provide an inaccurate value for a specific meal consumed by a specific consumer.
It is yet another disadvantage of prior art systems in that they fail to provide to the consumer a report having the nutritional information encoded in a computer-readable format, alone or in combination with a human-readable format.
It is yet a further disadvantage of prior art systems in that they fail to provide a point-of-sale reference to a report having nutritional information, where the report may be accessed from a database located apart from the point-of-sale.